My production company, like many of yours, has jumped with both feet into the HD waters.  Production is easier than ever with great tapeless acquisition formats.  Post keeps getting simpler with powerful desktop solutions and great breakout boxes.  Seems like the only place it really falls apart is the client review stage.

Sure, you can compress HD clips for web delivery.  Problem is most clients don’t have the monitor resolution, RAM, etc. to view HD (and don’t even get me started on color and contrast issues with the average PC monitor).  You could burn a Blu-ray disc, except at $12 a pop (plus rush courier) that gets pretty expensive (and time consuming). So what’s a discerning post company to do? No the answer is not VHS… it’s Apple TV.

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Author and video podcaster Richard Harrington discusses online video distribution with Cody Smith from kyte.com at NAB 2009. Distributed by Tubemogul.

Two weeks ago, I told you about our new group on Facebook for those interested in New Media. Many of you asked us to post the training videos to iTunes. We did.

You’ll also find 6 hours of free video training to check out on their site. I’m one of the organizers of the group and I hope you can share this info with others. The group is free... the video is free... knowldge is free... let’s make a difference.

Here are the six videos you can watch (in HD even).

• New Media Boot Camp – slides
• Facebook 101– Why all the Buzz? – slides
• Podcasting and Government – slides
• Blogging to Reach an Audience – Does Anyone Care What You Have to Say – slides
• It’s all About Mobility – Reaching Audiences on the Go – slides
• Producing Video for the Web – Best Practices for Big Results – slides

Enjoy.

It’s almost time for the National Association of Broadcasters Conference in Las Vegas (April 18-23). If you are planning on going to , this is your last chance to register for a free pass for the exhibit floor. After April 9, the price goes up.

Visit this page – http://registration.experient-inc.com/ShowNAB091/Defaultfull.aspx
Use this code – TP01

Also.. if you are looking for a huge training conference, check out Post|Production World (I have 14 classes over 5 days).

Seems like times are changing... Apple (and more importantly, movie studios) have decided to start offering high-definition movie sales and rentals through the iTunes Store. This is yet another sign that consumers want digital downloads (and are willing to pay a fair price). Let’s hope more studios come on board.

Starting today, movie fans can purchase box office blockbusters for download in HD for $19.99 from iTunes, and films will be available as iTunes Movie Rentals in HD for $4.99 within 30 days after release. Customers can enjoy these films in HD on their Mac or PC and on their widescreen TV with Apple TV, as well as in standard definition on their iPhone or iPod with video.

I recently had a chance to shoot a bunch of podcasts with Alex Lindsay and the great folks at Pixel Corps.

“Learn how to get the most out of your mac at Work! From iWork to communication to databases to networking hardware – MacBreak Work will help you MACsimize your productivity!”

Be sure to check out the new show, MacBreak Work.

You can view it on the web or subscribe for free in iTunes.

If you’re an editor, be sure to check out the Editors Retreat. This great event is a lot of fun and a wonderful learning experience (I’ve been 5 times its that good). The price is lowered, but you need to put a reservation in ASAP.

“With respect to the current economic times and in response to your requests, we are pleased to announce a price reduction for 2009 Editors Retreat. By shortening the length of the Retreat by one day, we’ve managed to cut the price from $3,150 to $2,300 without losing any of our key sessions.

The Retreat now includes:
• 4 days and 3 nights of sessions and activities
• All-inclusive resort stay
• See more here

And, a package of give-aways for each attendee worth $2,400 to include:
• A Full Pass to the 2009 NAB Post-Production World Conference in Las Vegas! (Valued at approx. $700)
• An Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium! (Valued at $1700)

With all of the give-aways and savings you actually receive more than the price of the retreat!

Join us for an amazing conference of advanced sessions, networking, creative workshops, award winning keynotes, raffles and unlimited access to representatives from Apple, Adobe and Avid!”
Registrations must be submitted before December 10th, 2009 with a 30% down payment. Visit www. EditorsRetreat.com for more info.

I know some of you hate iPhone posts (sorry)....

But here’s something I just had to gush about.... The mophie Juice Pack iPhone battery is shipping. I had the original battery pack, but with the new form-factor for the 3G phones, I had to upgrade. Here’s the specs:

• Standby Time – Up to 350 hours
• Talk Time – 6 additional hours on 3G | 12 hours on 2G
• Internet Use – 6 additional hours on 3G | 7 hours on Wi-Fi
• Audio Playback – 28 additional hours
• Video Playback – 8 additional hours

This device is absolutely awesome and lets me get through a long day of business.

Recently came across a new article about the growth in online video viewership. Be sure to check out what ABI Research has to say...

“Sparked by increasing broadband penetration and rising connection speeds available to a growing percentage of the world’s population, over-the-top video has seen phenomenal growth in very recent years. A new study from ABI Research forecasts the number of viewers who access video via the Web to nearly quadruple in the next few years, reaching at least one billion in 2013.
 
“The rapid expansion of broadband video creates opportunities across a number of market sectors,” comments senior analyst Cesar Bachelet. “A wide variety of actors aim to gain a share of this fast-growing market: not only content owners such as the BBC and NBC Universal, and Internet portals such as AOL and Yahoo!, but also a range of new entrants including user-generated content sites such as YouTube and Dailymotion, broadband video sites such as CinemaNow and Lovefilm, and Internet TV providers such as Apple and Zattoo.”

See the full article...

Gary-Paul interviews video podcaster Richard Harrington at the Photoshop World '07.

To make things easier, we’ve put together a new website for RHED Pixel Productions. Here you can find out information about all our podcasts, books, DVDs, and websites. Think of it as one-stop shopping where you can find all our training materials.

Feel free to take a quick browse and try out some of our new resources. I hope you enjoy!

I often preach extensively about project management at design and creative conferences around the globe. The one piece of paperwork that I always emphasize is completing a scoping document for a project then getting the client to sign off and accept it. This one piece of papaerwork can solve all sorts of problems and is really worth the 2-5 hours it takes to write. The outline is as follows.

Project Scoping Document

( 2 - 1 0 p a g e s )

• Project Name
• Executive Summary
• Background
• Project Scope (High Level)

• Project Objectives
• Deliverables
• Organizations
• Interfaces Required
• Assumptions
• Constraints
• Evaluation Criteria
• Risks
• Rewards
• Budgets
• Schedules (Due Dates)
• Project Team Readiness

• Key Roles

• Executive Sponsor
• Project Manager
• Business Experts
• Technical Experts

• Signature Lines - Sign Off “Charter”

I was over at YouTube posting a new tutorial.... came across a great clip that mixes multiple animation styles… this is VERY cool.  It’s nice to hear the man so off-the-cuff… yet wise.
“In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon’s every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit, and timeless message.”
Learn more about it here (and yes… I missed this one somehow).

What would happen if you locked Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in the same apartment (like Big Brother)? Well you get the risque comic strip – The Silicon Apartment (PG-13). The strip is really quite good and skewers both sides.

A new bill has been introduced into congress that would target accessibility of web video. The "21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2008" (H.R. 6320) covers about a dozen areas. The proposed law has Internet video captioning requirements.

Eighteen months after its enactment, the Federal Communications Commission must set up regulations and deadlines for "an appropriate schedule of deadlines for the provision of closed captioning of video programming distributed to the public over the Internet."

Three kinds of video would be affected:

• Material that has already been captioned for TV viewing
• Live programming
• Video that is "generally considered to be comparable to programming provided by multichannel programming distributors."

It is point three that is sticky. A whole lot of podcasts fall into this category. Closed captioning and transcriptions cost.... many podcasters see little if any profit from their shows. Always nice when congress sticks its nose in the Internet.

How about instead of sending money to worthless causes... they actualy fund this requirement.

One of the first bands I fell in love with during college was Nine Inch Nails (actually back then, it wasn't a band). The seminal record, Pretty Hate Machine was a mash-up of Prince Samples and Orchestral Scores from Stephen King and Clive Barker films (along with many other sounds). Since then Trent Reznor has continued to evolve/

Yesreday they‘ve releases The Slip—a new 10-track album—for free on http://theslip.nin.com/. The record is available in virtually every flavor of DRM-free digital format, all you need to do is give them your email address. The album will eventually be available in traditional formats as well. This move mirrors those of both Radiohead and Prince.

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Adobe released the Adobe Media Player software on April 9, which allows a customizable, cross-platform media player experience. Built using the Adobe AIR runtime, the media player harnessed the power of Flash to create a rich media experience. To complete the experience, Adobe adds support for both RSS feeds and H.264 video, two of the open standards used by the podcasting movement.

What does this all mean? I had a chance to sit down with Deeje Cooley, who serves as an evangelist for Adobe’s Dynamic Media Organization (and formerly as the product manager for the Adobe Media Player). Cooley was tasked with bringing the product to market and he shared insight into Adobe’s motivation for the product and goals for its role in the market. Unlike competing products, the Adobe Media Player has chosen to focus on being a video-only player.

“The growth of video online, the dramatic growth of flash as the video delivery mechanism of choice… there was a ripe opportunity to take advantage of all these events around the industry,” said Cooley. “We started to build an RSS aggregator and quickly recognized that video was going to be a significant media online and so it became a video RSS aggregator. And so that’s really the birth of the Adobe Media Player.”

MUCH MORE AFTER THE JUMP

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Digital Media Wire has a very interesting article about the fate of HD-DVD. Seems Wal-Mart had dropped HD DVD (along with Best Buy and Netflix).
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Toshiba "is expected to pull the plug on its HD DVD format in the coming weeks." THR noted, however, that Toshiba says no official decision has been made. "Given the market developments in the past month, Toshiba will continue to study the market impact and the value proposition for consumers, particularly in light of our recent price reductions on all HD DVD players," Jodi Sally, VP of marketing for Toshiba America Consumer Products, told THR. Toshiba had hoped that slashing the prices on its HD DVD players last month would help bolster sales, but subsequent sales data from NPD showed that Blu-ray maintained its wide sales lead despite the move.  

• Related Links:
• http://www.walmartfacts.com/articles/5673.aspx
• http://tinyurl.com/2wn5fe (Hollywood Reporter)
• http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2008/02/15/wal-mart-drops-hd-dvd%3B-toshiba-expected-pull-plug

The American University has released a new report called Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video, which finds that many online videos creatively use copyrighted materials in ways that are eligible for fair use consideration under copyright law. The report claims that some users are potentially using copyrighted material legally (under fair use). These uses--an exercise of freedom-of-speech rights--are currently threatened by anti-piracy measures online. The report is online here - we hope you enjoy it!

Those who know me personally, know I am very passionate about podcasting. I have been hard at work for the last year on a new book on just that, video podcasting. My business partner, Mark Weiser, and I have taken many of the hard lessons learned at RHED Pixel and put them into a book. The book is full color and richly illustrated, plus there will also be a companion website and podcast launching in January.

The book ships in February, but you can get the biggest discount by pre-ordering it from Amazon.com.

I've taken part in MacUpdate's bundle deals for a while now... here's their latest and greatest. This deal runs out soon.

“MacUpdate has partnered with 11 Mac developers to bring you a great software bundle. You can buy this bundle for $49.99 instead of $666.74, a savings of $616.75 This amazing offer is time limited so buy today.”

Here are my favorites from the bundle

• ForkLift – A useful FTP application
• RapidWeaver – A great website and blogging tool, how this website is made.
• Xslimmer –Trim an applications by removing universal versions (going to just PPC or Intel) as well as Internationalization files.
• Yep – A really cool cataloging tool for PDF files
• SRS iWOW – Makes iTunes sound great on a laptop.
• XMIND 2008 Pro – A mind-mapping application that helps creative types get their ideas down.
• iStabilize – A REALLY good image stabilization program for shaky footage.
• PulpMotion – A surprisingly useful motion graphics tool with some cool templates

If you need to put together a storyboard, you have lots of options. But the process of laying out the pages and dealing with changes to shot order or selection can get tedious. Fortunately there is a free solution called Directors Boards which alleviates most of the challenges (no, it won't draw for you).

This great program is based on Filemaker, but doesn't need you to have the full program installed in order to run. You essentially load in information regarding the shots including the audio and video columns, shot number, and a thumbnail image. Directors Boards then allows you to organize the shots as well as create a sldieshow presentation or print out professional looking storyboards. The product is cross-platform and free... what more do you need? Well there is a more robust version called Directors Notebook, which we are putting through its paces and will have a detailed review soon.